Archive for November 2013

In all the media coverage of the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, with its predictably misleading analysis of the attendant conspiracy theories, there are a few intriguing facts that you are unlikely to read.

Fact #1: When John F. Kennedy demanded in a personal letter dated May 18, 1963 that David Ben-Gurion end Israel’s nuclear weapons program — considered by one leading Israel advocate in a 2010 Jerusalem Post op-ed to be “necessary to ensure Jewish survival in a very hostile world” — the Israeli Prime Minister “abruptly resigned” in order to avoid answering.

Fact #2: Kennedy’s alleged lone assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was assassinated by Jacob Rubenstein, whose rabbi recently told The Jewish Daily Forward that he thinks Ruby told him when he visited the mobster from Chicago the next day in jail, “I did it for the Jewish people.”

At no point have more than 36% of Americans believed Kennedy was assassinated by a lone gunman. What is it about human psychology that makes conspiracy theories so appealing?

Perhaps it has something to do with many people’s healthy, well-founded skepticism of the media’s rather selective reporting of the facts. Or that no matter how manyconspiracy theories they are prepared to discuss, journalists will rarely, if ever, look into the one conspiracy that might tell us who had the most to gain from Kennedy’s abrupt death 50 years ago today.

On November 13, the US House Committee on Foreign Affairs held a hearing entitled “Examining Nuclear Negotiations: Iran After Rouhani’s First 100 Days.” Two of the three witnesses who provided testimony — Mark Dubowitz, executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and Danielle Pletka, the vice-president for foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute — work for pro-Israel think tanks; while the bio of the third witness — Georgetown University professor Colin Kahl — boasts of “promoting unprecedented defense cooperation with Israel.” As part of his work on behalf of Israeli interests, the Committee chairman Ed Royce has tried, along with Howard Berman, to pass an anti-incitement bill “to tie aid to the Palestinian Authority to a set of criteria to require the end of [terrorist] incitement.” If you have the stomach for this Israeli-occupied propaganda fest, watch what “unbiased” advice these “experts” had to offer the Obama administration on US national security interests.